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Message: <blockquote data-quote="The-Magic-Sword" data-source="post: 8622567" data-attributes="member: 6801252">OC, at least in terms of its roots, is decidedly DIY, the core roleplaying experience is brought by the players-- you can do it in posts on a message board, with no mechanics, at most some gentleman agreements, or people who have just enough clout with the other people to enforce standards. So when you think about mechanics for the OC crowd, they're not looking for a design that produces and drives their narratives, they're looking for tools that enhance their existing play.E.g. Combat is a little annoying to do in freeform, because you end up in the awkward spot of who has narrative authority over which attacks hit and what they do to the other person, we used to call it God-Moding to take control and say your attack hit someone else, and it was also frowned upon to just dodge everything. So when we carry that tension forward to tabletop rpgs, it becomes clear that they just need a way of codifying their character's abilities to resolve who wins, not an engine to say, produce complications in an entertaining spiral of drama, because they already do that and want it to center more strongly on their own intentions for the character. 'Trad' games have traditionally approached combat as a (simplified but sometimes intricate) simulation, which means they focus on answering the immediate question of what happens when someone shoots a gun at you, or swings a sword, similarly, they have a lot of little widgets that can reflect different parts of a character, and allow you to be texturally different from other participants in terms of mechanics, potentially even giving you a play style-- the ultimate form of expressive empowerment in so far as mechanics are concerned. So it might seem un-intuitive, but the OC attachment to trad game styles is fairly well supported. Heck even the core conceit of trad, the main plot, can serve to unite the characters and keep them in the same story (which was another problem with some sufficiently long running forum rps.)</blockquote>

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